We are a team of two 14 year high schoolers looking to create a robot with computer vision.

I was wondering what some good software is(Keep in mind that our budget is very small).

We have a web cam, a arduino, a laptop computer to use. We also have enough hardware to build the robot itself.

by computer vision do you mean object recognition through a camera or just adding sensors so that it can follow lines or not bump into things? or are you just trying to stream video from a moving robotic platform? just about anything you want to do with a web cam will require that you use that laptop onboard the the robot platform as the arduino is neither powerfull enough nor is it designed for use with a usb webcam. object recognition is going to be even harder but there is software out there and i have seen it done in the past though usually with a stationary computer that tells the difference between a cube and a ball so assuming the software exists in the capacity you're looking for it would still be verry difficult to make your robot actually get usefull data that it can make decisions based on. if you want to stream video and sound then that's SUPER easy and can be done with both msn and skype. if you plan to go this rought then you can develop sketches on the arduino to communicate with your laptop through serial using a Visual basic program or varios other programing softwares as well. this makes your arduino basicly like an I/O board for your laptop and is very easy. if your laptop has a parralel port then it can do all this whithout an arduino! if you just want to detect obsticles then you should look into IR sensors which can detect distance and even color in some configurations (for tasks such as line following). for this you would only need the arduino.

Logged

"sure, you can test your combat robot on kittens... But all your going to do is make kitten juice"

if you just want to detect obsticles then you should look into IR sensors which can detect distance and even color in some configurations (for tasks such as line following). for this you would only need the arduino.

OpenCV is a open source computer vision library created by Intel several years back for the C/C++ programming languages. It has a little bit of a learning curve but in general is relatively easy to use. Plus, because it is open source and has been around for so long, there are a ton of resources and documentation surrounding it. Its available for windows and linux, and has wrappers available for a few other languages (including python and java) as well. Here is a link to their wiki:

OpenCV is a open source computer vision library created by Intel several years back for the C/C++ programming languages. It has a little bit of a learning curve but in general is relatively easy to use. Plus, because it is open source and has been around for so long, there are a ton of resources and documentation surrounding it. Its available for windows and linux, and has wrappers available for a few other languages (including python and java) as well. Here is a link to their wiki:

OpenCV is a open source computer vision library created by Intel several years back for the C/C++ programming languages. It has a little bit of a learning curve but in general is relatively easy to use. Plus, because it is open source and has been around for so long, there are a ton of resources and documentation surrounding it. Its available for windows and linux, and has wrappers available for a few other languages (including python and java) as well. Here is a link to their wiki:

In terms of Python: I don't know a thing about Python but there is a ton of resources out there. For specific questions that people can't answer here, check out the OpenCV forums. There is a really active online community, and I'm sure you can get help with it there. Also, a google search for "python opencv" reveals a ton of web pages, including step by step lessons. Stick with it and I think you will find OpenCV is a fantastic tool.

In terms of VC++: Are you adding the correct include folders to your project? Have you linked to the correct libraries? Is the OpenCV directory included in you PATH?

RoboRealm might work for you. It is a gui based image processing program. Little to no programming required.I went on to their website and noticed they have started to charge for the software. It used to be free for private use. Not sure how it goes with licensing, but maybe you could get it for free if you can find an old version?